Author Archive | Jared Newman

Google Gets Snakey in YouTube Easter Egg

Posted by Jared Newman on July 26, 2010 at 9:00 am

As if watching YouTube wasn’t already a good way to procrastinate, now you can play Snake right inside many of YouTube’s videos.

YouTube user BikdipOnABus gets credit for documenting the Easter Egg, whose simplicity is astounding: On videos with the new playback style (the one with the thick red progress bar that narrows when you move the mouse away from it), click on the video window, then hold left on your keyboard. The video can be paused or playing when you do this.

To try it yourself, I recommend the YouTube video of a plain black screen, which should become pretty popular with this discovery.

YouTube Snake is not a particularly good version of the classic dot-eating game. I’m actually partial to Gmail’s take, which you can activate in Gmail Labs and play by typing “&” on the main screen, as long as you have keyboard shortcuts enabled. Unlike the YouTube version, Gmail’s “Old Snakey” saves high scores, has obstacles and speeds up as your snake gobbles more pellets.

Still, YouTube Snake is worth keeping in mind next time you’re watching something that drags on, but isn’t quite boring enough to stop watching entirely. I won’t read into it much further than that — I already had my fun interpreting Google Pac-Man — though it is interesting how the occasional game has cropped up on YouTube lately.

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The $35 Tablet PC: Not Buying It Yet

Posted by Jared Newman on July 23, 2010 at 12:46 pm

How many times will we be burned by the promise of ultra low-cost computers, like the $35 touch screen PC the Indian government just announced?

India has a prototype of the cheap computer, and plans to roll the real thing out to Indian schoolchildren and higher education students in 2011. It’ll have a Linux-based operating system, a USB port, a 2 GB memory card and other unspecified specs, the Guardian reports. But as fascinating as the super cheap laptop concept may be, there’s always some snag, gotcha or fatal flaw that prevents the promises from matching up with reality.

In the case of One Laptop Per Child, the goal of a $100 laptop was never achieved. Even in the second-hand eBay market, asking prices are closer to $200. Earlier this year, a website claimed to offer $98 laptops running Windows CE, but that site is now defunct. Another company called Cherrypal has tried making a name for itself with dirt-cheap laptops, like the 7-inch model running Android for $100, but getting one can be a hassle, as one customer has documented.

The $35 tablet’s problem is already clear if you read the AP’s coverage: India wants to get the price down to around $20 in order to sell the tablet at home, but to do that, the country either needs to subsidize the cost itself — a tall order with 110 million kids targeted in the initial roll out — or convince manufacturers to set higher prices in the developed world.

In other words, the $35 tablet’s manufacturing cost alone would be more expensive outside of India. Let’s make the grand assumption that manufacturers would even want to deal with thinner profit margins than netbooks; I wonder whether consumers in the developed world would be willing to pay for a tablet with no memory, an unknown operating system and other specs that apparently can’t even be mentioned at this point in time.

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THQ and the Death of Mediocre Video Games

Posted by Jared Newman on July 23, 2010 at 9:33 am

Quotables from video game industry executives are usually not interesting to me, but I want to dwell on a comment from Ian Curran, THQ’s executive of global publishing, on why the company won’t be releasing sub-par video games anymore:

“[W]e can’t afford anymore to bring mediocre games to market,” Curran told CVG. “There’s no room for them. You’re either a standout, best in class, or you die. We won’t bring bad games to market anymore. You can’t spend $30, $40, $50 million on a bad game and expect to make a return.”

The point here is not Curran’s promise of better games from THQ, but the idea that anything less than the best is simply not worth developing. Review aggregation site Metacritic notes that average review scores in the first half of 2010 are up from the same period last year, even though overall game sales are down. Even a steady stream of top-notch games, such as Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption and Super Mario Galaxy 2, can’t lift the games industry from its current rut.

The upshot, according to conventional wisdom, is that game publishers will take fewer risks and we’ll be subject to an endless cycle of mindless sequels, but that hasn’t proven totally true. Original games like Heavy Rain, Alan Wake and last year’s Demon’s Souls are still available to those who seek them. Meanwhile, Xbox Live Arcade, the Playstation Network and WiiWare have provided a refuge for less expensive game development, and we’ve seen some great stuff in those download stores. This week’s Xbox Live Arcade release of Limbo, a critical darling, is a great example.

In light of so many great games with budgets big and small, Curran is saying that the middle ground — games from major publishers that aren’t highly-anticipated — has eroded. Publishers will either have to try harder to create the next blockbuster, or focus on low-cost, low return development instead. I’m fine with either.

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Droid X Consuming 5x Data of Other Verizon Phones. Say What?

Posted by Jared Newman on July 22, 2010 at 3:24 pm

Motorola’s Droid X isn’t the only high-powered Verizon smartphone available, but it’s the biggest bandwidth hog according to one company executive.

Here’s the claim from Jennifer Byrne, Verizon’s business development executive director, made during the paidContent Mobile conference on Tuesday (emphasis mine):

“On Droid X, we’re seeing something like 5x the data usage of any other device.”

I’m skeptical. Droid X may be Verizon’s flagship smartphone at the moment, but it’s not the only one likely to consume lots of data. For Android alone, there’s the Droid Incredible, Droid Eris and plain old Droid, and I have a hard time accepting that Droid X users are suddenly way more likely to gobble up bandwidth. The only difference between Droid X and is peers is the option of becoming a mobile hotspot for $20 per month, and if that’s causing the data spike, it says more about mobile hotspot use than it does about the phone itself.

Still, the essence of Byrne’s statement is probably valid: Verizon’s seeing a huge uptick in mobile data use thanks to the popularity of Android smartphones, lending credence to the rumors that Verizon will nix unlimited data plans in favor of tiered packages.

The spike in data use also amounts to a day of reckoning for Verizon.  The carrier has said in the past that it’s equipped to handle the kind of traffic generated by an iPhone. Obviously, Verizon would be dealing with a lot more bandwidth demand if it ever got the iPhone, but think of the Android invasion as a sneak preview. If Verizon can handle this, it may have a chance at dealing with Apple’s traffic.

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Microsoft Might've Killed Xbox 360 vs. PC Gaming

Posted by Jared Newman on July 22, 2010 at 8:45 am

Ever wish you could play Gears of War for Xbox 360 against someone who owned the PC version, or vice versa? Microsoft reportedly did too, but might’ve killed the concept of PC vs. Xbox 360 gaming because console controls just aren’t accurate enough.

That’s the rumor coming from Rahul Sood, the founder of Voodoo PC and chief technical officer of HP’s gaming business. He cites “reliable sources” who say Microsoft was working on a way for PC gamers and Xbox 360 gamers to play together, but problems arose during testing. Mediocre PC gamers were able to wipe the floor with even the best console players, because the PC’s mouse-and-keyboard combination was so precise.

Sood doesn’t say definitively that Microsoft killed the project because of the accuracy issue, but he lays heavy blame on Microsoft for not seeing the project through. The rest of his blog post is a ramble on the decline of PC gaming, the threat from Apple and a strange plug for WebOS game development (“and while it may take time for new devices to start showing up, you can rest assured that the wait will be worth it”).

If Microsoft was working on a way to connect Xbox 360 and PC gamers, control differences seem like a petty reason to ax the project. Why not require PC gamers to use an Xbox 360 controller in order to dive in with the console crowd? Or limit connected play to cooperative games such as Borderlands, instead of competitive ones in which the PC gamer has the advantage?

I hope Microsoft revisits (or visits) the issue some day, especially with Windows Phone 7 presenting its own opportunities for gaming. If Microsoft really wants to unify the PC, television and phone, there needs to be a way for gamers to interact across all three platforms.

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Here Come More Microsoft Stores

Posted by Jared Newman on July 21, 2010 at 1:10 pm

Microsoft is apparently pleased enough with its four existing retail shops to build dozens more Microsoft Stores in the future.

Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, revealed the plans during last week’s Worldwide Partner Conference, and Softpedia just picked up on his remarks. Turner didn’t give specifics on when or where Microsoft will open its next batch of retail stores, but we do know that Bellvue, Wash. location is on the way.

From Turner’s comments, it seems like Microsoft values the experience of interacting with customers more than any direct profits gleaned. He noted that the stores have been “an incredible learning vehicle for us” and said “direct contact with consumers in the community is awesome and it’s an awesome thing for us to do.”

The existing stores — in Mission Viejo and San Diego, Calif., Scottsdale, Ariz., and Lone Tree, Colo. — are quite Apple-like, with big tables full of tech products, roving employees and a counter for tech support. (It seems that Microsoft’s failed efforts at cool remain intact.) They also have some unique features, like Microsoft Surface and the ability to order a PC game and have it printed on demand.

In the near future, Microsoft could really use more retail stores for two major product launches. One is Kinect for Xbox 360, a motion-sensing camera that goes on sale in November. Given that Kinect requires roughly six feet of room according to Amazon, I’m not sure how many other retailers will want to dedicate the floor space to hands-on demos. Microsoft, on the other hand, is already showing off the technology at its existing stores.

The other product is Windows Phone 7. At any other retailer, the guy behind the counter could recommend an iPhone, Android phone or Blackberry to customers. Microsoft’s going to want a place to pitch Windows Phone 7 face-to-face.

So when Turner says “we’re going to build dozens more stores,” that ought to be sooner rather than later.

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ToneCheck Detects and Corrects Your E-Mail Tone of Voice

Posted by Jared Newman on July 21, 2010 at 9:27 am

For all those times that an e-mail sounds better in your head than it does to the recipient, ToneCheck thinks it can help.

The plug-in, which is in a free-for-now beta for Microsoft Outlook and coming to web-based mail services in the future, reads over your e-mails for emotions such as elation, humiliation, excitement and fear. Users can set thresholds for how much emotion to allow in their e-mails, and ToneCheck essentially acts like a spell checker, flagging words and phrases that might be interpreted the wrong way.

ToneCheck’s website has a demo that shows how it works, but I don’t use Outlook, so I haven’t tried the plug-in myself. If anyone tries it, I’d love to hear how well it works. On that note, it would be wise for ToneCheck to offer a web app in which people could dump text from any source, and if they were sufficiently happy, they could pay for the plug-in on their service of choice.

In general, my feelings about ToneCheck are somewhat similar to my feelings about SarcMark and Open Sarcasm, both of which are intended to express sarcasm as punctuation. For someone with decent writing skills, none of these tools are really necessary. I could see a computerized emotion catcher being downright annoying.

But at least ToneCheck isn’t a substitute for the written word, like SarcMark. It’s just a teacher, designed to stop people from writing e-mails they’ll regret later. If that makes the world — or your inbox — a better place, I’m all for it.

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Facebook Users Are Unhappy With Facebook, Survey Says

Posted by Jared Newman on July 20, 2010 at 1:17 pm

What do Facebook, cable companies, airlines and online tax returns have in common? They’re all about as likely to displease their customers.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index, conducted by the University of Michigan’s business school, this year included social networks for the first time. Wikipedia and YouTube escaped with decent ratings — 77 points and 73 points out of 100, respectively — but Facebook fared poorly with 64 points. That puts the world’s most visited website in the bottom 5 percent of private sector companies in the survey.

Survey participants knocked Facebook’s endless interface tweaks, spam and the technology that controls news feeds, the Wall Street Journal reports. They were only somewhat concerned with privacy even though it was a hot topic a couple months ago, and they also named increased advertising as a source of dissatisfaction.

Interestingly enough, MySpace performed just about as poorly, with 63 points. MySpace has been losing unique monthly visitors for a couple of years, to the point that Facebook gets roughly double the traffic, according to comScore. I’d say that’s a cautionary tale for Facebook, except that MySpace’s rapid decay had as much to with competition from Facebook as general user dissatisfaction. At this point, Facebook’s worst enemy is itself.

There’s some evidence that the rate of Facebook sign-ups is slowing down, but only in the short-term. And an informal survey of Technologizer readers shows enough dissatisfaction that people are willing to pack up and leave the service. But where are those people going to go?  Facebook can be replaced to some degree with a mish-mash of other services, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr. Even so, those services won’t be comparable unless you can convince everyone to come with you.

Without an all-encompassing service that provides more satisfaction, Facebook can rest easy while it figures out how to better please its users. As Facebook spokesman Jonny Thaw stated to the Wall Street Journal, “We look forward to the next survey.”

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